Year 2, Month 12, Day 13: First Off, I Didn’t Borrow It. Second, It Was Broken When You Gave It To Me. And Third, I Fixed It Before I Brought It Back.

New York’s Murdoch outlet runs a fairly even-handed report on the Durban Debacle:

World climate talks are on the brink of failure as several of the largest polluters — including the United States — could block attempts to save the only treaty on governing global warming.

The 194-nation UN climate conference in Durban, South Africa, is scheduled to end later Friday after two weeks of tense negotiations.

Under the proposed deal, the European Union would extend its pledge to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.

In exchange, other countries would have to promise to negotiate another deal that would include legally binding obligations for every nation — not just for the wealthy, industrialized countries who initially approved the Kyoto Protocol.

The European Union has also maintained it will not renew its pledge, which expires next year, without agreement to begin work to compel all countries to curb their emissions, including the U.S., China and India.

The comments, as usual on Murdoch-owned outlets, are a great outpouring of stupid. Sent December 9:

The scientific evidence confirming the rapid warming of Earth’s atmosphere is growing faster than the glaciers are shrinking. In consequence, the paranoids who once theorized that global temperature measurements were part of a giant liberal conspiracy have retreated; their new position is that while the planet is indeed getting hotter, humans aren’t responsible.

Once the nay-sayers absorb the massive amounts of evidence for human causes of climate change, they’ll assert that climate chaos can only be solved by “the power of the free market,” presumably including tax cuts for the wealthiest 1%.

Let’s review: first they claimed it wasn’t happening; now they claim humans didn’t cause it. The denialists were wrong then, they’re wrong now, and they’ll be wrong in the future. So why are they still determining American environmental and energy policy? The US should lead the world in coping with climate change, not stand in the way of progress.

Warren Senders